It’s no secret to students that coed dorms are more fun than same-sex dorms. But they can also fuel very unhealthy behavior that might otherwise be moderated.
A new study finds university students in coed housing are 2.5 times more likely to binge drink every week. And no surprise, they’re also likely to have more sexual partners, the study found. Also, pornography use was higher among students in coed dorms.
Some 90 percent of U.S. college dorms are now coed.
More than 500 students from five college campuses around the country participated in the study.
When my dorm went coed (by floor) I remember that almost immediately the smell of the dorm changed from stale beer and urine to clean. I also remember , on a visit to Rollins Colllege, nearly diving into the urinal when two women walked passed me in what I learned was a coed bathroom. This said, is it really some sort of surprise that unchaperoned teens engage in hedonism when placed together in a large building filled with beds? I hope parents out there are not deluding themselves.
The surprise is that anyone is surprised.
Vanguard University in Southern California remains a relatively safe place to send your kids. No coed dorms there, and chapel attendance is required for all undergrads. At least that was the situation when I was attending in 2006.
I still can’t bring myself to think about the barracks at The Citadel being coed and the problems that have resulted.
Dorm rules were just beginning to relax when I went to UGA – my dorm may have been the only one on campus that allowed males to visit until 2 a.m. One poor girl on my hall rarely got to sleep in her room because her roommate’s fella spent most nights in there. There was no one to search the dorm for men at 2 a.m.; I never heard of any guy getting caught, though sleeping over was quite common. What is the message in all this but “Go ahead, enjoy”? What did anyone really expect would happen when dorms were made coed? An enriched learning environment???
Another reason to consider Christian colleges…
Hmm…I lived in the women’s dorms at Baylor, and a co-ed dorm at UT Arlington. While I had a more memorable college experience at Baylor (likely due to it being my freshman year), I liked the co-ed dorm at UTA better because it was a more relaxed atmosphere. The sexes were separated into different wings and the rooms were actually suites with individual bathrooms. I never had to worry about taking a shower during “visiting hours” (usually the only time I could manage) in a community bathroom and risk running into men wearing nothing but a towel or getting locked out of my room accidentally.
I wouldn’t know about the difference in sexual activities, but as far as drinking went, I saw more binge drinking at Baylor where alcohol on campus was forbidden than UTA where 21+ students were allowed to have alcohol in their dorm rooms as long as there were no underage roommates. Go figure.
Dartmouth went one better than coed. It allowed homosexuals to live in women’s sections and was considering giving homosexuals their own dorms. This is called “accepting reality.” Yeah., Right. (I donot know that these changes are still in existence. For sheer dumbness, they shouldn’t be.) Larry